NuView Files Away Files

Storage software startup NuView Inc. is pushing further into information lifecycle management, as it starts shipping its brand new File Lifecycle Manager (FLM) software today (see NuView Manages File Lifecycle).

The new addition to the Houston, Texas-based companys storage management software portfolio aims to simplify the movement of files between primary and secondary storage, thus creating a tiered storage architecture.

Using FLM, storage administrators can set policies to automatically move certain types of files, or files that have passed a certain age, to secondary storage on cheaper ATA disk drives. This clears space on the primary storage, thus slashing costs, even while it allows users access to the files in the exact same way as before, according to NuView CEO Rahul Mehta.

“We wanted to make this transparent to the end user,” he says. “When we move files from the primary to the secondary storage, the end user never knows they’ve been moved.”

In addition, Mehta says, the software has an active/passive architecture, ensuring that users can only write to the primary storage. If, for instance, a spreadsheet hasn’t been touched for, say, more than a year, and has been moved to secondary storage, it would be moved back to primary storage before anyone could make any changes to it. This capability helps shrink the amount of data companies have to back up, Mehta contends, since they only have to back up their primary storage where all changes are made.“The magic essentially is that we’ve returned things to the file-system level,” Mehta says. “The software knows exactly what the user is trying to open, and we’ve made the whole process transparent.”

The new FLM software fits into NuView’s overall information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy, which aims to move data over to less expensive storage as its value diminishes (see ILM Remains Illusory). The company’s existing StorageX software, for instance, provides a global namespace -- a sort of meta-directory of NAS namespaces -- that allows storage administrators to automatically move and manage data across heterogeneous NAS environments as if they were a single filer (see NuView Relocates NAS Data).

Mehta says he expects many companies will opt to combine the two software products. “First you use StorageX to make 10 devices look like one device, and then you put FLM on there to move data between primary and secondary storage."

The FLM software, which is installed on Windows servers (nothing older than Windows 2000), costs between $10,000 and $25,000, depending on the NAS devices and the amount of storage it’s managing.

NuView already has one customer, Mustang Engineering LP, for its new software product, according to Mehta. In addition, he says, over a dozen other companies are in different stages of the purchasing process.As for competitors, he insists that the company’s approach is completely unique [ed. note: never heard that one before]. The only thing that comes close, Mehta claims, is hierarchical storage management (HSM) solutions, which migrate data from disks to tape drives. “Most customers want to do something like this,” he says. “The challenge until now has been that people have only thought about putting this stuff on tape.”

NuView, which is privately funded and employs about 40 people, also offers tape as a third tier in the storage architecture. However, Mehta admits, once files have been moved to tape, they suffer from high latency and are no longer easily accessible.

A number of other companies do in fact offer similar storage management functions, especially for the migration of email, but The Clipper Group Inc. analyst Michael Fisch says that most of the existing offerings work at the application or block level. “The file-level is certainly one place where you can get some value out of this functionality,” he says.

— Eugénie Larson, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch